Product Overview

ActiveCampaign is a one-stop marketing solution that promises “marketing automation that listens and learns.” The platform merges email marketing, automation, sales and CRM tools, and targeted messaging tools to streamline the user experience.

Customer data is consolidated and organized so that users can make bigger-picture marketing decisions throughout all stages of the customer journey: from initial contact to conversion to long-term relationship nurturing. The software is ideal for small-to-midsize businesses, allowing them to build and segment contact lists, send professional drag-and-drop emails, manage marketing campaigns, track and analyze customer behavior, and measure overall website and email campaign performance.

Users can integrate with social media platforms and a number of third-party CRMs, as well as more than 150 app integrations through Zapier. It also offers proprietary sales force automation (SFA) features like customer journey management, deal tracking and lead scoring.

ActiveCampaign’s solutions are helpful for various business verticals (agencies, bloggers, ecommerce, and SaaS) as well as teams (customer success, marketing, and sales). Overall, it proves to be an exceptionally affordable, well-designed, and easy-to-use solution compared to others in its category.

Features

ActiveCampaign is built to help users automate marketing and sales processes. Below, we’ve listed four key features that make this happen:

Marketing Automation: With ActiveCampaign’s intelligence-driven automations, users can initiate campaigns, update contact data, and reach out to sales leads with minimal training. The automation tool is drag-and-drop features and drop-down menus that make campaign-building simple. In addition, ActiveCampaign logs every interaction, so users can track lead behaviors and know what actions contacts are taking.

Lead & Contact Scoring: Users can define an ideal lead profile, adjust lead scores as they take defined actions, and add rules to improve their definition of a perfect lead. ActiveCampaign also provides business marketers with a ranked, frequently-updating list of their top-performing leads so their sales team is always focused on the best lead at the ideal time.

Split Actions: ActiveCampaign allows users to split test the email campaigns used in automated workflows, create conditional processes that adjust when defined conditions are met and configure splits for varying business processes. As a result, users are able to optimize every aspect of their business until they have carefully honed sales and marketing processes running at optimal efficiency.

Attribution: Attribution is deeply integrated with ActiveCampaign’s powerful marketing automation software. Users can leverage conversion and source information to develop unique experiences for contacts, trigger automations and more. Attribution utilizes the standard UTM parameters business marketers are already using to track visitor sources, so they don’t need to change anything to begin.

Broadcast Email Marketing?

Campaign Reporting and Analytics?

CRM Integration?

Forms and Landing Pages?

Lead Management?

Lead Nurturing?

Lead Scoring?

Triggered Email Marketing?

Target Market

ActiveCampaign initially served small and medium businesses and has scaled up its operations to accommodate larger companies in industries like education, hospitality and high-tech. Here’s a list of notable customers:

Boutique Hotel Seven Days

ApproveMe

MyGreenFills

Earth Hour

Thrive Themes

TETON Sports

Scott’s Cheap Flights

Cupid’s Charity

Mimobee

SAGU (Southwestern Assemblies of God University)

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Implementation/Integration

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based platform, making implementation quick and simple. Users can access a number of support resources for initial set up, integrating with their other software and becoming more familiar with the platform.

Users who would like more hands-on help can schedule one-on-one training, which typically consists of a 30-minute call that offers a detailed walkthrough of the platform as well as marketing and strategy support. Users in Chicago can schedule an in-person training session.

Customer Service & Support

ActiveCampaign provides support via email and live chat. Enterprise users receive priority email and chat support, as well as phone support. Users also have access to a robust Help Center and community forum for troubleshooting and learning more about how to maximize their experience on the platform.

For users who would like to test out the platform before making a purchasing decision, ActiveCampaign offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.

Lite Plan: The Lite plan offers the basics of the platform. Features include unlimited email sending, email marketing capabilities, newsletter sending capabilities, marketing automation, and chat and email support. This plan supports up to 3 users and starts at $15/month ($9/month if billed annually) for up to 500 contacts. As contacts increase, the pricing also increases. For over 100,000 contacts, call ActiveCampaign’s sales reps for a quote.

Plus Plan: The Plus plan offers the same features as Lite, plus CRM with sales automation, contact and lead scoring, custom user permissions, a custom domain, custom branding, SMS marketing capabilities, and one-on-one training. This plan supports up to 25 users and starts at $70/month ($55/month if billed annually) for up to 1,000 contacts. For more than 25,000 contacts contact ActiveCampaign’s sales reps for a quote

Professional Plan: The Professional plan offers the same features as the Plus plan, in addition to site messaging and attribution. This plan supports up to 50 users and starts at $159/month ($129/month billed annually) for up to 2,500 contacts. Users with more than 25,000 contacts, please contact ActiveCampaign’s sales reps for a quote.

Enterprise Plan: Enterprise users receive all the benefits of the Professional plan, plus a custom mailserver domain, in-depth onboarding, a dedicated account representative, free social data, free design services, priority support including phone, and a 99.9% uptime SLA. The plan supports unlimited users and starts pricing at $279/month ($229/month billed annually). For more than 10,000 contacts, contact ActiveCampaign’s sales reps for a quote.

Shortcomings

The campaign reporting feature has no path for ad hoc reports. Users are provided with canned system reports and some options to use filters and advanced search to attempt a workaround. Also, ActiveCampaign doesn’t have its own landing page builder.

Screenshots

About

ActiveCampaign is an advanced marketing automation and sales CRM solution with a foundation in email marketing. Jason VandeBoom created it in 2003, but when ActiveCampaign started, it started as a conventional software firm with a focus on private labeling and letting users resell. About a decade in, VandeBoom decided to transition to SaaS, which allowed the company to have more control over the user experience and establish a certain revenue stream. Today, ActiveCampaign is one of the biggest names in the SaaS industry with 100+ employees in its offices.

ActiveCampaign’s goal is to find a perfect blend of automation and human touch. The organization has grown rapidly to raise $20M in funding, generate over $10M in annual revenue and pivot from offering perpetual software licenses to a well-thought-out SaaS model. ActiveCampaign has several clients in different industries, including Earth Hour, Southwestern Assemblies of God University and Boutique Hotel Seven Days, among others spanning SaaS, e-commerce and non-profit. The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.